Guides to Elsewhere: transcendent travels

Linda Toigo, Guides to Elsewhere: City of the Immortals (photo by: Mattia Reiniger)

My brother travels a lot; he has been all around the world and he has a talent in changing flats, countries and time zones without losing his thirst for adventures.

He also reads continuously; he devours books – he actually used to chew paper when he was a child and this must have somehow altered his DNA – and keeps voraciously buying new ones.

When he left London for a new continent, I received a huge amount of his volumes, too expensive to ship and impossible to give away.

Linda Toigo, Guides to Elsewhere: Atlantis (photo by: Mattia Reiniger)

Two cubic metres of books: mainly essays about development countries and bios of economists that are waiting for me to change career and start reading.

There was also a good amount of travel guides; Lonely Planets, that have been sitting on my shelves for years, reminding me of my relative stillness, until I decided to do what I like doing most with old books: to create a new story for them.

Linda Toigo, Guides to Elsewhere: Zenobia (photo by: Mattia Reiniger)

I have recently found out about a fantastic book written by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a catalogue of thousands of fantasy lands, islands, cities described in centuries of world literature.

Linda Toigo, Guides to Elsewhere: Shadowed Forest (photo by: Mattia Reiniger)

My adopted collection of old Lonely Planets and this precious anthology of impossible places had to be merged somehow.

This is how my work Guides to Elsewhere began: an ongoing series of imaginary places modelled on the covers and with the pages of  travel guides.

I am now working on more books for an exhibition in London next month: www.lindatoigo.com/guides.

The next posts will show how my volumes are created and what they are inspired by.

Tags: Alberto Manguel, Gianni Guadalupi, Lonely Planet, paper city, shadows, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, travel guides